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The 2016 Tech 50: Chris Corrado

The London Stock Exchange Group’s COO comes in at No. 40, down from No. 30 last year.

By Peter Vasiliev

July 18, 2016

< The 2016 Tech 50

Chris Corrado

Chief Operating Officer

London Stock Exchange Group

Last Year: 30

In March, four months after Chris Corrado’s arrival at London Stock Exchange Group, the company sealed its $20 billion merger-of-equals agreement with Deutsche Börse (see Andreas Preuss, No. 28). But Corrado says the pending deal has not affected the information technology projects and momentum he inherited when Antoine Shagoury (No. 25) moved to State Street Corp. Shagoury’s five years at LSEG saw multiple installations of subsidiary MillenniumIT’s high-performance trading and postttrade systems, and postmerger integrations of FTSE Group and LCH.Clearnet Group. “This company wants to be one of the top three in market infrastructure in the world,” says Corrado, 56, who is both chief operating officer and chief information officer. “It’s been quite a ride so far.” In February, Corrado launched a three-year IT plan covering the three main business lines: capital markets, data, and settlements and clearing. Technology management is being decentralized among business-unit CIOs, who have access to a newly created shared services unit — a structure not unlike others Corrado has seen evolve over a 35-year career that included stops at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch & Co., UBS and, most recently, MSCI, which he joined in 2013 as the indexing giant’s first CIO. Corrado has a team of about ten in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. researching such emerging technologies as machine learning and big-data analytics. Several working groups are investigating blockchain for posttrade processes and private markets, and there is a partnership with IBM Corp. to develop an open-source implementation. “It’s kind of like how the Internet took off,” Corrado says of blockchain adoption. “You always have the bleeding edge, the leading edge, the mainstream and then the laggards.” For LSEG lagging is not an option.

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The 2016 Tech 50